Business Books

Stumbling on Happiness

Daniel Gilbert

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 217 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Do you know what makes you happy? Daniel Gilbert would bet that you think you do, but you are most likely wrong. In his witty and engaging new book, Harvard professor Gilbert reveals his take on how our minds work, and how the limitations of our imaginations may be getting in the way of our ability to know what happiness is. Sound quirky and interesting? It is! But just to be sure, we asked bestselling author (and master of the quirky and interesting) Malcolm Gladwell to read Stumbling on Happiness, and give us his take. Check out his review below. --Daphne Durham

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Guest Reviewer: Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of bestselling books Blink and The Tipping Point, and is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

Several years ago, on a flight from New York to California, I had the good fortune to sit next to a psychologist named Dan Gilbert. He had a shiny bald head, an irrepressible good humor, and we talked (or, more accurately, he talked) from at least the Hudson to the Rockies--and I was completely charmed. He had the wonderful quality many academics have--which is that he was interested in the kinds of questions that all of us care about but never have the time or opportunity to explore. He had also had a quality that is rare among academics. He had the ability to translate his work for people who were outside his world.

Now Gilbert has written a book about his psychological research. It is called Stumbling on Happiness, and reading it reminded me of that plane ride long ago. It is a delight to read. Gilbert is charming and funny and has a rare gift for making very complicated ideas come alive.

Stumbling on Happiness is a book about a very simple but powerful idea. What distinguishes us as human beings from other animals is our ability to predict the future--or rather, our interest in predicting the future. We spend a great deal of our waking life imagining what it would be like to be this way or that way, or to do this or that, or taste or buy or experience some state or feeling or thing. We do that for good reasons: it is what allows us to shape our life. And it is by trying to exert some control over our futures that we attempt to be happy. But by any objective measure, we are really bad at that predictive function. We're terrible at knowing how we will feel a day or a month or year from now, and even worse at knowing what will and will not bring us that cherished happiness. Gilbert sets out to figure what that's so: why we are so terrible at something that would seem to be so extraordinarily important?

In making his case, Gilbert walks us through a series of fascinating--and in some ways troubling--facts about the way our minds work. In particular, Gilbert is interested in delineating the shortcomings of imagination. We're far too accepting of the conclusions of our imaginations. Our imaginations aren't particularly imaginative. Our imaginations are really bad at telling us how we will think when the future finally comes. And our personal experiences aren't nearly as good at correcting these errors as we might think.

I suppose that I really should go on at this point, and talk in more detail about what Gilbert means by that--and how his argument unfolds. But I feel like that might ruin the experience of reading Stumbling on Happiness. This is a psychological detective story about one of the great mysteries of our lives. If you have even the slightest curiosity about the human condition, you ought to read it. Trust me. --Malcolm Gladwell

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Dilbert 2.0: 20 Years of Dilbert

Scott Adams

Amazon Price: $53.55 List Price: $85.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Andrews McMeel Publishing Amazon Marketplace: 4 new & used starting at $53.55

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Editorial Review:

Book Description
Scott Adams "is a VERY tough act to follow." --Suzanne Tobin, Washington Post

In the tradition of The Complete Far Side and The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, Dilbert 2.0 celebrates the 20th anniversary of Scott Adams's Dilbert, the touchstone of office humor.

This special slipcased collection--weighing in at more than ten pounds with 600 pages and featuring almost 4,000 strips--takes readers behind the scenes and into the early days of Scott Adams's life pre-Dilbert and on to the success that followed when Dilbert became an internationally syndicated sensation.

Divided into five different epochs, Dilbert 2.0 gives readers a glance at some of Adams's earliest strips, like those created for Playboy, and a peek at an abundance of special content ranging from numerous rejection letters to Adams's first cartooning check, and more.

Adams personally selected the material for this collection and offers original comments and humorous asides throughout. Also included is a piracy-protected disc that contains every Dilbert comic strip to date and that can be updated as new cartoons are released.

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Damn, it Feels Good to Be a Banker: And Other Baller Things You Only Get to Say If You Work On Wall Street

Leveraged Sellout

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In one word: egregious.

Damn It Feels Good To Be A Banker is a Wall Street epic, a war cry for the masses of young professionals behind desks at Investment Banks, Hedge Funds, and Private Equity shops around the world. With chapters like "No. We do not have any `hot stock tips' for you," "Mergers are a girl's best friend," and "Georgetown? I wouldn't let my maids' kids go there," the book captures the true essence of being in high finance.

DIFGTBAB thematically walks through Wall Street culture, pointing out its intricacies: the bushleagueness of a Men's Warehouse suit or squared-toe shoes, the power of 80s pop, and the importance of Microsoft Excel shortcut keys as related to ever being able to have any significant global impact.

The book features various, vivid illustrations of Bankers in their natural state (ballin'), and, in true Book 2.0 fashion, numerous, insightful comments from actual readers of the widely popular website LeveragedSellOut.com.

Thorough and well-executed, it's lens into the heart of an often misunderstood, unfairly stereotyped subset of our society. The view--breathtaking.

Reader Responses

"After reading this clueless propaganda, I strongly believe that you are a racist, misogynist jerk. FYI, Size 6 is not fat." --Banker Chick

"Strong to very strong." --John Carney, Editor-In-Chief, Dealbreaker.com

"I used to feel pretty good about making $200K/year." --Poor person

Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace

Gordon MacKenzie

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 107 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Creativity is crucial to business success. But too often, even the most innovative organization quickly becomes a "giant hairball"--a tangled, impenetrable mass of rules, traditions, and systems, all based on what worked in the past--that exercises an inexorable pull into mediocrity. Gordon McKenzie worked at Hallmark Cards for thirty years, many of which he spent inspiring his colleagues to slip the bonds of Corporate Normalcy and rise to orbit--to a mode of dreaming, daring and doing above and beyond the rubber-stamp confines of the administrative mind-set. In his deeply funny book, exuberantly illustrated in full color, he shares the story of his own professional evolution, together with lessons on awakening and fostering creative genius.

Originally self-published and already a business "cult classic", this personally empowering and entertaining look at the intersection between human creativity and the bottom line is now widely available to bookstores. It will be a must-read for any manager looking for new ways to invigorate employees, and any professional who wants to achieve his or her best, most self-expressive, most creative and fulfilling work.

This Is the Part Where You Pretend to Add Value: A Dilbert Book (Dilbert Books (Paperback Andrews McMeel))

Scott Adams

Amazon Price: $10.39 List Price: $12.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Andrews McMeel Publishing Amazon Marketplace: 36 new & used starting at $6.34

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

More Dilbert fun 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Another great Dilbert read with the occasional surprise appearance - the dead horse, scape goat etc. Just relaxing and pure fun. A bonus this time is that ALL the cartoons are in color.

Adams - As Sharp & Funny as Ever! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This latest (31st) collection of Dilbert cartoons contains all the syndicated cartoon strips (including the longer Sunday strip) from March 2007 - early January 2008. As a bonus, they are now ALL in colour, not just the Sunday ones. I have really enjoyed this collection - Adams has hit a new bit of sharp form in this latest collection. Wally, PHB, Alice....they are all here. An excellent, humourous read. Highly recommended.

Editorial Review:

"Ninety percent of ethics is picking the right ethicist." --Dilbert

Scott Adams offers up his this Dilbert collection exploring themes of sloth and corporate indifference. The arbitrary, unspoken rules of interoffice emailing, the random policy generator, and the knowledge that management has indeed given up ever trying to win an award for best place to work all combine to make life in the Dilbert workplace as demoralizing as real life.

Dilbert navigates through the same corporate 9 to 5 existence in which his readers physically dwell. Dilbert, Dogbert, the boss, Wally, Alice, and Catbert tackle corporate indolence, avarice, and pretense one strip at a time, from the neighboring cubicle whistler to the project naysayer to the guy who's always just too busy to lend a hand.

Happy Hour Is for Amateurs: A Lost Decade in the World's Worst Profession

Philadelphia Lawyer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 47 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Entertaining, Accurate, and Insightful 5 out of 5 stars.
16 of 16 people found this review helpful.

Half-memoir, half-gonzo, Happy Hour Is For Amateurs is greater than the sum of its autobiographical parts. Ultimately, the book is a morality play; the deadly sins are sacrificing happiness for a paycheck and perpetuating the status quo in a morally bankrupt industry.

Some readers may object to the author's profanity and depiction of drug and alcohol use--of course, some readers call Mark Twain "racist" and Aldous Huxley "immoral." In other words, if you have a weak constitution or delicate sensibilities, this book probably isn't for you.

This book is for: (1) every worker who's ever felt like a cog or an itinerant, (2) every person who thinks, "this is as good as it gets for me," and (3) anyone who enjoys funny, insightful writing on topics most people can relate to. From the book: "There's an accidental wisdom in following. Letting something else define you narrows the decisions you have to make. It gives you parameters, a track to follow and a holiday from all the angst that comes with carving your own path." `Following' is exactly what some people need--this book is for everyone else.

Happy Hour Is For Amateurs is not a book about being a lawyer, it's a book about being unsatisfied with what you do. (Though it's completely, depressingly accurate if you want to know what the actual practice of law is like for the majority of attorneys.) It's about settling and the push-pull of childhood dreams--and adult dreams--against the weight of responsibility and expectations. Philalawyer escaped, and most of us haven't, a fact sure to generate equal measures of envy and hostility. Either way, this book is compulsory reading for every disaffected office monkey, every fungible bureaucrat.

The writing is always serviceable and frequently soars. Some readers may quibble with the non-linear style--but this isn't a novel, and each chapter contributes something important on the way to understanding the overall ethic of the author. The momentum slows very occasionally, but the humor underlying each vignette is more than enough to
excuse the occasional digression.

Lawyers, in particular, will nod their heads in agreement or sympathy throughout Philalawyer's book. Equity partners in big law firms might not get it, and associates on the same track will probably ignore it. The rest of us will say, "Thank you," and buy him a drink.

Editorial Review:

For some people, happy hour is never enough

This is a book about escape. It's also about laughing gas. And bourbon and dope and sex and mushrooms and every other vice millions of us indulge in to forget our jobs, the office, and the stifling, corporate caricatures we're forced to become for paychecks. This is a book about a decade lost in a senseless career no one likes and all the ridiculous things I did to run from it. In the end, it's probably your story as much as mine. We're everywhere. We just can't say it out loud.

The Big Book of Humorous Training Games (Big Book of Business Games Series)

Doni Tamblyn, Sharyn Weiss

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Humorous Training Games 3 out of 5 stars.
6 of 10 people found this review helpful.

These games are helpful but not as "quality" as most trainers seek. Good for a springboard but not enough meat.

Well worth the money 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 9 people found this review helpful.

I especially like the section on Assertiveness which teaches assertiveness without fear and the section on Working with Difficult peers in the workplace. Very appropriate and hard hitting.

Great fun! 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

A very valuable resource. It teaches while keeping people in a very good mood.

Well structured and effective 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I already used it with young people. And it's easy to use, has nice games, and I like the debriefing questions.

What I was looking for.

Editorial Review:

To produce changes that last beyond the classroom, training games must engage restless audiences, keep them interested­­and make learning fun!

The Big Book of Humorous Training Games uses witty, engaging games to create memorable lessons in numerous basic training topics, including customer service, teambuilding, creative problem solving, time management, and more. Step-by-step instructions work with dozens of reproducible handouts and worksheets help trainers and speakers minimize preparation time­­and maximized training success.

Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager

Michael Lopp

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Managing Humans is a selection of the best essays from Michael Lopps web site, Rands In Repose. Drawing on Lopp's management experiences at Apple, Netscape, Symantec, and Borland, this book is full of stories based on companies in the Silicon Valley where people have been known to yell at each other. It is a place full of dysfunctional bright people who are in an incredible hurry to find the next big thing so they can strike it rich and then do it all over again. Among these people are managers, a strange breed of people who through a mystical organizational ritual have been given power over your future and your bank account. Whether you're an aspiring manager, a current manager, or just wondering what the heck a manager does all day, there is a story in this book that will speak to you. You will learn:

• What to do when people start yelling at each other

• How to perform a diving save when the best engineer insists on resigning

• How to say "No" to the person who signs your paycheck

Among fans of Michael Lopp is the incomparable Joel Spolsky, cofounder and CEO of Fog Creek Software:

"What you're holding in your hands in by far the most brilliant book about managing software teams you're ever going to find".

This book is designed for managers and would-be managers staring at the role of a manager wondering why they would ever leave the safe world of bits and bites for the messy world of managing humans. The book covers handling conflict, managing wildly differing personality types, infusing innovation into insane product schedules, and figuring out how to build a lasting and useful engineering culture.

Rhinoceros Success

Scott Alexander

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Repetitive and lacking in direction 2 out of 5 stars.
6 of 10 people found this review helpful.

This book is meant to be motivational, but the message grows stale rather quickly. The author's main points are that one must be thick-skinned and aggressive (a rhinoceros) to succeed in life, but they are repeated so often that most of the book could be summed up in a few pages. There is an overuse of exclamation points, question marks and UPPERCASE emphasis as if the author is not just content to continuously repeat the message. In his opinion, there must be internal emphasis as well.
After reading the book, I did not feel motivated, I felt relieved. The easiest thing in the world is to say, "Be powerful and tough" to anyone and everyone. However, life is far too complicated for a simple message, even a good one, repeated over and over to be enough to insure survival. Without some specifics about how a rhinoceros acts, then it is just a slogan. And let us not forget that the rhinoceros has the worst eyesight of any large mammal, so bad that it cannot tell a human from a tree at 15 feet. This means that it quite often doesn't know exactly what it is that it is charging. Charging ahead without knowing what is in front of you or what direction you are going is dangerous. There is little of that "think before you charge" mentality expressed in this book.

Where Are the Customers' Yachts: or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street (Wiley Investment Classics)

Fred Schwed

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 30 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

"Once I picked it up I did not put it down until I finished. . . . What Schwed has done is capture fully-in deceptively clean language-the lunacy at the heart of the investment business."
-- From the Foreword by Michael Lewis, Bestselling author of Liar's Poker

". . . one of the funniest books ever written about Wall Street."
-- Jane Bryant Quinn, The Washington Post

"How great to have a reissue of a hilarious classic that proves the more things change the more they stay the same. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent."
-- Michael Bloomberg

"It's amazing how well Schwed's book is holding up after fifty-five years. About the only thing that's changed on Wall Street is that computers have replaced pencils and graph paper. Otherwise, the basics are the same. The investor's need to believe somebody is matched by the financial advisor's need to make a nice living. If one of them has to be disappointed, it's bound to be the former."
-- John Rothchild, Author, A Fool and His Money, Financial Columnist, Time magazine

Humorous and entertaining, this book exposes the folly and hypocrisy of Wall Street. The title refers to a story about a visitor to New York who admired the yachts of the bankers and brokers. Naively, he asked where all the customers' yachts were? Of course, none of the customers could afford yachts, even though they dutifully followed the advice of their bankers and brokers. Full of wise contrarian advice and offering a true look at the world of investing, in which brokers get rich while their customers go broke, this book continues to open the eyes of investors to the reality of Wall Street.